(1) low audio quality making it difficult to understand the speaker/easily distracted by background noise, (2) lack of access to non-verbal communication channels like body language requiring dedicated brainpower to understand the speaker, (3) dysmorphia brought on by hyper awareness of one’s appearance, (4) lack of adherence to societal norms in conversation
I feel like remote work has leveled the playing field in a way that requires everyone to be explicit in their communication.
Even if your video conferencing apps doesn't have captions, your OS might (Mac does, for example). Not as good as one in the conferencing software (which can label speakers), but it's better than nothing.
This feature also helps if you join a meeting and don't have your audio set up right.
> requires everyone to be explicit in their communication
Allocate $300 per person to get everyone a podcaster mic and a pair of open backed headphones to plug into it as a monitor so you hear your own voice through your headphones. It removes the feeling that you need to speak loudly to be heard, which is a lot of the fatigue.
And if both parties are using this setup, it greatly reduces the "only one person can speak at a time" feeling, allowing you to use more natural vocal interactions without feeling like you're interrupting.
Together it makes a huge difference. I have audio processing and sensory problems and used to be so drained after a 40 minute zoom meeting. With this setup I can spend 4 hours a day pair programming and be appropriately tired but not exhausted.
Your 3-4 and large meetings with executives screaming into their laptops from coworking spaces I have no solutions for however.
This setup is as minimal as I was able to get it: no big booms on my desk to move around, microphones blocking my video, etc. Yeah, I look like a pilot on calls, but the audio quality is amazing. Also, the mic being close to me blocks background noise, and isolates it from my desk. Sometimes my colleagues with podcaster-style mics have issues with mechanical transmission from their desk setups, while I have none.
People often comment — even to this day — about my audio quality. I talk to people all day, being in sales, and it makes a huge difference in my presence and professionalism. Absolutely worth every penny I spent.
As a side note, I also use my iPhone as my webcam (continuity cam I think it's called) along with a couple Logitech lights on my monitor, and the overall quality of my digital presence often blows people away.
Honestly I'm sort of surprised that there isn't training about this given how much sales training people go through. Presentation is HUGE. A good mic, a proper camera, and even just minor consideration for lighting make anyone so much more credible, and pleasant to talk to.
It's not that surprising, it's fairly technical and many don't want to deal with it (ask anyone if they know what XLR or phantom power is), another problem is there's so many different options that it often leads to choice paralysis and some people feel uncomfortable to ask for money to buy better equipment.
Myself and my team are all technical sales folks with engineering backgrounds, and we naturally optimize for this sort of thing — all of us have some form of “advanced” setup that’s been informed by each other’s investment.
On the other side, NONE of our account reps have anything remotely close. I can think of one or two times in the past few years when someone asked me about what tech I use. My company even has a home office budget benefit meant for exactly this sort of thing!
A wired headset plus my mixer gives me an opportunity to tinker and upgrade my setup as I wish, and is all USB powered to boot.
I have some rough plans to make a simple audio interface with built in sidetone for use as a portable setup, but haven’t had the time to turn it into a real product. Someday!
How does it work? Asking, because I always have this issue in 3+ person calls, where I'm frequently starting to talk just about when someone else does, ending up in those awkward "oh sorry you go please" moments. That makes me prefer to not say anything at all unless explicitly talked to.
I always assumed that my issue is that I'm just a slow-thinking dumbass who can't get the cues in time (which is true, because it happens in face-to-face in-person conversations as well, just less frequently), but maybe it's a technical issue contributing to it?
The parent commenter, I believe, is talking about the problem where people use speakers and active noise cancellation, which makes it impractical to speak and be heard at the same time; the noise cancellation will ruin the speaker-user's mic audio while it has to cancel out another speaker. Headphones, worn by all parties, resolves this issue.
But I think video conferencing software is built around the assumption that people are using their speakers and so the output is also picked up by the mic. So some of it is increased latency caused by filtering that out. And then it keeps people basically muted until it determines they're trying to speak, and there's a delay with it toggling.
If you're using a mic and headphones at all though, there are settings that cut a lot of that out. They're usually kind of inscrutable like in zoom IIRC it's called "audio for musicians" or something like that. If both people are using headphones and have those settings on, it removes most of that "switching talker" latency.
As you add more people it's harder and harder to get everyone configured correctly, which is why having company buy-in and policy is important. Sheer network latency comes into play too, but most people working from home probably have acceptable connections.
How's your experience with this regarding soundproofing the room. Is normal noise filtering fine? I assume you have the mic on a boom with a pop filter.
If you are using both your laptop's microphone and speakers, then Teams/Zoom has to decide whether to play audio to you, or pick up audio from you. If you're talking at the same time as someone else, the audio quality for everyone in the meeting suffers.
All laptop speaker/mic combos use AEC[1], where they can both playout and pickup at the same time. There is actually 2 layers of this in many systems, one provided by your device, and a 2nd layer provided in software by Zoom/Teams/Meet etc.
What can happen is that the meeting audio is a mixture of the top-N loudest participants. N+1 people talking will conflict badly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_suppression_and_cancellat...
*inserted [] for clarity
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/w...
It’s a wired headset with a condenser mic I feed into a daw with real-time compressor and eq. No software required or processing done on the computer. The only thing I’m missing is a wireless headset with audio in and out that can be routed to the DAW. Wireless headsets connect to the computer via usb which is a shame. All of my friends use steelseries and it sucks because I constantly have to ride their volume levels because the boom arm moves out the ideal position and they don’t have a leveler to do deal with it.
I have the mic on an arm to cut down on bumps and typing transmitting through the desk, but I find it doesn't have to be right in my face. I have it above the monitor, out of view of the camera. YMMV depending on room echo, my walls are bookshelves which is pretty good as treatment.
1. Podcast bro / Twitch streamer (giant mic inches from face)
2. Gamer (headphones with or without a headset mic)
3. Call center employee (open back mono headset with mic)
Turning off video is obviously the fastest fix to this. But assuming you don't want to do that...
You'll find a lot of people hate wearing headphones since it messes up their hairstyle or just looks distracting or some other sensory issue with having something clamped to your head. Earbuds work better for them; as long as the mic can't hear other speakers, the annoyance of half-duplex audio is eliminated.
The mic problem is harder if you don't want something obvious in frame. Lav mics work if you know how/where to attach one and to minimize clothing movement noise. Other options will require some level of room treatment if the mic isn't close to the speaker's mouth.
I do have quite a few people that are non native English speakers that though not really difficult to understand, have great english and don't have very thick accents, does still up the difficulty slightly. Most of them also don't have the greatest audio setups (but not the worst, often plugin headsets with the dangly mics).
I love the video, lack of it drives me nuts.
A deaf dancer friend uses an app, I think from Google. We’re often in discussion/teaching circles in dance classes. Seems to work well.
“Real time” is relative though. Conversation latency matters in roughly the tens of milliseconds and it’s certainly not near that fast.
The group has to be attuned to having a turn for her to speak. She’ll pretty often come in at the same time as someone else, missing those subtle sounds of someone else about to talk. The emergent rule is “tie goes to her”.
This all works well in the mindful scene of Berkeley experimental dance workshops. Maybe she’d get steamrolled in a competitive finance office or something.
I would really appreciate this.
As the other commenter pointed out, iOS now has it. There are also apps in the app stores.
You have to maintain perfect composure because there's a camera pointed right at your face transmitting your minutest reactions to the rest of the group.
It's especially difficult when you're in a meeting that just won't end, or somebody keeps going back to a tiresome subject that's already been beaten to death. You can't even allow yourself a look down or a raised eyebrow without rudely signaling your boredom to everyone else on the call.
People are primarily looking at the speaker, secondarily at themselves, third is probably checking slack/email/whatever and only in a deep 4th or 5th place is anyone paying any attention to the expression on other people's faces.
Realizing that nobody is paying that much attention and doesn't care hopefully can make the calls less stressful and exhausting for you.
1. Primarily at oneself 2. Anything else on the computer 3. Speaker
Oh, one must. It is an important signalling mechanism. How else will people know that the horse they are beating is dead?
yeah, Eye Contact Correction is a thing now
How is that any different than an in person meeting?
There is this assumed necessity that a video call is so much better for these meetings. I never enable the camera during meetings. Some is sharing their screen, and we simply discuss it. As a sibling comment points out, nobody looks at the thumbnails of the nonspeaking person. If the presenter is trying to look at the thumbnails of the viewers then they are probably not presenting very well. They are just distractions.
Maybe this is a generational thing, as I also never use FaceTime or whatever other video calling, and I'm a gray beard without the beard. Typically, the only ones I see doing that are those that are younger.
Because you can see yourself. Whereas people IRL conduct themselves in ways that are unoptimized - because they can't see themselves, and since everybody is unoptimized it doesn't really matter.
On a video call, everybody is watching how they look, if you're the one who isn't paying attention then you're the odd one out.
Moreover the geometry of a group video call can be very unphysical if everybody can see everybody else including themselves.
Not my experience in the slightest, and it is rather surprising to hear about others’ experiences from the comments in this thread.
While I don’t disagree that maybe other people do experience calls this way, I would ask: how can everyone simultaneously be watching themselves and also others for others to make a faux pax? It doesn’t seem possible.
You realize that by hiding your boredom from everyone on the call, you are signaling to them that the discussion is interesting and thus you encourage them to continue that discussion.
We could argue about whether it should be that way (I'm quite unsure tbh), but I would advise people who care about professionalism to default to on.
Specifically they feel a need to project a high standard of presentation at work, which is labour-intensive to accomplish, and - quite rightly - they don't want to feel forced to do the same thing to their home environment, or have relative strangers able to see into their homes.
Cameras on certainly shouldn't be mandatory.
The conflict is between on the one hand the need to stay alert, focused and in-the-moment, and a physical environment that lacks stimulating cues. Your body wants to zone out, but you can't, as you'll get no advance warning of cues to re-engage, so it's like fighting sleepiness constantly.
In-person meetings are so much less fatiguing, because you can spend about 60% of the time basically daydreaming and still contribute effectively - perhaps, more so - whenever needed.
EXACTLY. Latency is a killer. Even on cell phones.
Latency does not get enough attention. It's not as in-your-face as dropouts, but the levels of latency which we experience in modern communication channels are crazy bad.
And even if platforms are aiming for 150 ms, in practice the latency is often much higher than that.
Every internet connection I've had over the past 10 years in the US has been fast enough to send and receive at least a dozen uncompressed CD-quality PCM streams simultaneously. On paper, my current fiber connection should be able to handle 1,400 of them. This insistence on audibly mangling the audio to keep it at ~96 kbps makes less and less sense every day -- especially considering how the audio is usually carrying all the important information in the call anyway!
(I find the same thing happens on streaming services too. 98% of the bits are for video, 2% for sound.)
Honestly, my bluetooth headset probably adds almost as much latency as my fiber connection and wifi combined. That's another issue most people don't even consider: bluetooth is orders of magnitude slower than a wire, even in the best case scenarios.
If every packet has a risk of being dropped or of arriving out of order then increasing either the size or the sheer quantity of those packets will also increase how often they get mishandled or buffered.
Plus you run into compatibility problems between different kinds of devices such as mobile users trying to connect over spotty 3G connections.
The secret to making online meetings bearable is simple: use audio only - just like talking on the phone, which people can do happily for hours. I don’t need to see you, and you don’t need to see me, but we can always share a screen if necessary.
It's really a shame that people have made it almost weird to not have cameras on. Admittedly it can be nice to see the other participants in the meeting but I find it's only useful for the first 5 minutes, then it may as well go to audio. Saves on bandwidth too.
How are they getting these numbers? Is it that a word is typically a few bytes worth of characters and we can process a couple words per second? Or are they really saying that all the information we perceive during a conversation can be reduced to less than 15 bytes per second? The former seems like a flawed comparison, and the latter seems ludicrous.
> "I have a small scientific comment on your post. Although I think it represents my results very well, I find the opening sentence: “A new way to analyze human reaction times shows that the brain processes data no faster than 60 bits per second.” a bit misleading. I don’t think I have shown anything about the upper bounds of the processing speed, in principle the curve I show in Figure 4 of the manuscript could extend far beyond this, but I have no information to make this extrapolation, so I would not claim (for the moment) any upper limit."
Britannica[2] has an explanation of historical estimates, which are in the same ballpark: "For example, a typical reading rate of 300 words per minute works out to about 5 words per second. Assuming an average of 5 characters per word and roughly 2 bits per character yields the aforementioned rate of 50 bits per second." However, 2 bits per character is a 4-letter alphabet, so already they have to be talking about some information theory version where the information density in an English word is much lower than what individual letters can encode (which makes sense, the bigram qz has zero occurences while th is frequent).
It goes on to explain that "in other words, the human body sends 11 million bits per second to the brain for processing, yet the conscious mind seems to be able to process only 50 bits per second" except that his is ludicrous on its face, at least by some measures, as the bps from the eyes alone in the table just below this paragraph is 10 million bps. Clearly, the "lexical task" of reading words involves processing much of that visual input -- even 0.1% would still be 10 kbps -- which is handwaved away in the lexical stream example to pretend that the brain receives a direct serial input stream of 2-bit characters.
Furthermore, it's easy to find other estimates of information processing that suggests the input from a single eye is more like 1.6 gigabits per second[3], which is 320x higher than the 10 megabit total given by britannica. The article explains that there's already compression before it hits the brain, though, as the optical nerve is limited to around 100 megabits per second.
The 120 bit upper limit seems to be an invention of psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (and purportedly independently by Bell Labs engineer Robert Lucky, though I can find no primary source that supports that claim), and is mentioned in that context in the wikipedia article for Flow[4].
1: https://www.technologyreview.com/2009/08/25/210267/new-measu...
2: https://www.britannica.com/science/information-theory/Physio...
3: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/the-information-enteri...
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Mechanism
They need to cut out some of the yapping by deciding, writing things down, and sharing this info.
The way I handled it was to simply take over the meetings and run them myself, but that didn’t address the underlying problems (poor management skills and a lack of respect for staff time).
That saying "people don't leave companies they leave managers" is about to prove itself true again...
What gives me fatigue is the opposite. It's the meetings where I have nothing to say whatsoever. It's driven by the refusal, or inability, of organizers to plan or focus their meetings. I spend >95% of my meeting time trying to judge how little attention I'm allowed to pay to what's being discussed. Because I usually can't just leave and actually focus on work, but I also can't pay attention because the conversation is meaningless to me (think: discussing extremely specific problems of projects I've never heard of). There's no winning move, so "try to keep an ear open for my name or other keywords while I fidget, draw, or otherwise waste time" is unfortunately the optimal strategy in most meetings, even though it's extremely tiring. Can't imagine if I had to have my camera on.
Now that I've written all this out... I might just start leaving meetings and hope I don't get fired.
I'm double- and triple-booked most time slots of most days, so I'm constantly skipping meetings, and it's just not a big deal. Even when I'm not double-booked, I am ruthless about what meetings I agree to attend. If there is nothing for me to say or hear, I just decline the meeting and get actual work done. In 25 years of working, Lumbergh has never even once stopped by my desk to say, "Yeaaaaaah, so, Peter, I notice you haven't been coming to meetings..."
i have concerns about what happened to it all. i have people that actually see hand writing, even typing, as too complicated, or takes too long.
>"Recall that compared to electronic devices, the human brain operates at ridiculously slow speeds of about 120 bits (approximately 15 bytes) per second. Listening to one person takes about 60 bits per second of brainpower, or half our available bandwidth."
Source? I was under the impression that the brain's processing is a lot more complicated than that and you couldn't reduce it to something so simple as 'bits per second'. Plus, during the average conversation, there must be enormous sums of data being processed - like the author mentions. Body language, tone of voice, social concerns, smell, sight, etc. There's no way that's a mere '60 bits' per second.
Can't figure out mute, crappy angle, bad lighting, noisy background, where is screen share? Where is chat? How to use breakout?
That said, people complain a lot about Microsoft's software but the whole integration of Teams with the rest of the 365 suite (collaboration tools etc) still is superior to anything else I've used.
My response was, verbally to the whole group, "Not for me. I've been through two hurricanes in two weeks and haven't had power in 5 days, so I'm going to skip the camera. Thanks!" I'll talk all day long, but nobody has any claim to my face or to making me perform. Until the pandemic we lived in a world where vast amounts of business happened on the phone, and while I tend to think video-based tools have presented HUGE opportunities to improve collaboration across diverse geographies, they've also created opportunities for abuse from people who want petty control, the first of which is ensuring they can call you out for looking out the window, looking at your phone, etc. Pound sand.
On the flip side, if you want to be sneaky, you could probably remove/disable all of your cameras in software, which then telegraphs to everyone that you don't have a camera at all, even if you do.
Sure, but employers also have a right to make cameras be required (saying nothing of the wisdom of such a policy). Most people have a huge amount of requirements to “perform” in their work in various ways.
The value has always been in the audio or what someone is sharing on their screen.
Video is mostly a distraction. If it is my meeting then video is going to be disabled for everyone.
My experience is that the people who love video is highly correlated with people who love useless meetings.
Strong agree. If you want your video on, I am cool with that. If you want it off, also cool. If you're not present, I'm going to know either way, but I want you to be comfortable while we work together. I care about the output and outcomes, not the control. n=1, ymmv, etc.
Im not sure I ever had a meeting with everyone in the same room.
I'm in consulting and the guys who are willing to be on camera have way more success with their clients than the guys who aren't. I learned to 'do conference calls' when I was younger and playing WoW with my guildies so I scoffed at it, but seeing really is believing. You are more likely to land a sale, get fewer objections to your project roadmap, your clients are more engaged with what you say... just everything is slightly better.
Video gets more info about how certain, cooperative, serious, how well listening etc people on the other side are. Also the relationship (boss/right hand etc) between speaker and non speaker on the other side gets more obvious.
What are really actually exhausting are meetings that shouldn't have happened, and people trying to force everybody to be on camera. My solution to unnecessary meetings I'm not willing to complain about is doing the dishes, folding the laundry, or otherwise paying only the required attention while otherwise occupying myself.
It's a complete distraction and should be off by default.
Who holds a small mirror to their own face while speaking with someone in front of them?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8823563/
https://tmb.apaopen.org/pub/nonverbal-overload/release/2
https://news.stanford.edu/2021/02/23/four-causes-zoom-fatigu...
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=zoom+fatigue+medical+re...
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/psychological-explorat...
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-90677-1_...
https://community.macmillanlearning.com/t5/bits-blog/beyond-...
https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online...
I bring this up because it’s the elephant in the room that nearly every open source team out there inherently knows, but that people in general do not want to discuss because it is to the greater population an alien subject matter. My own bias of course is I often do not want to watch videos or listen to podcasts. They are slow, give me a transcript and let me run through it in my own way to process the information in a non-linear/chronological format.
I’ve heard over many years now a kind of defeated attitude about it. Sometimes it’s things like “I can’t read emotions through text” to which I would honestly ask if the person ever read a novel and can say that with a straight face, but some of it is to do with people being comfortable with a particular medium and, maybe, being unwilling to adapt. Regardless, the internet in and of itself has had a tremendous impact which will far outweigh any particular (maybe flimsy) stance on peoples preferences when applied to market conditions/expectations. Companies that adopt the nature, constraints and perks of the internet will inherently do better than those that don’t.
That said, I think it's a challenge for people who didn't exist in that space from a young age and figure out the patterns that make it manageable.
The sad thing is that these are probably easy things to learn, but there's no real movement to try and teach them. Instead, we try to replace our amazing battle-tested text-based tools with crappy multimedia substitutes.
It's definitely good to jump on a call sometimes, but I'd much rather have an in-depth technical discussion via writing. History is full of brilliant written correspondence between legendary figures in art, science, engineering, and business—but somehow we've decided that letters are not good enough for us.
The exception that proves the rule is Amazon, who apparently require written content to be submitted and read prior to in-person meetings in order to improve the discussion.
We have an entire generation of people who grew up on short form text as their primary way to communicate electronically. In many cases they won’t even bother to read even a couple of paragraphs.
In a work setting, all the shorthand slang and emoji/meme based communication is unprofessional and in my experience many people actively remove emotion from their slack messages. We strive to be neutral and objective because slack messages are monitored and forever.
As much as I hate to say it, I am not completely opposed to some form of limited RTO because Zoom and Slack simply are not enough to get context in many environments, even if you are added to every thread and meeting.
Perhaps that's the problem? Texting pretty much killed phone calls, everybody has learned to communicate over text.
It is not a false equivalence but rather a statement that there isn’t anything inherent about text that makes it devoid of emotional quality.
For people who aren’t reading between the lines: we need to get better at writing. My over all point is, in large part, about that. That the denizens of internet who have been around for decades already possess this skill because they have, I would hope, successfully applied it and shipped (in my example) open source software as a distributed text based communication team.
If you can write code, you can create documents that include all the necessary details for a handover—without needing to be a brilliant writer—as long as you're aware that you're required to do so.
The problem is that if an employee's job involves giving presentations, they'll likely be explicitly trained on it and given additional tips of they're struggling. Most offices haven't established a training process for written communications - even emails, guidance is often "Do it right. No, not like that, right, like this."
To be effective, you need to be skilled at both the code AND the written word, because these are all vehicles which are ultimately used to communicate with other human beings. Just like it's a myth that you can get into software in order to avoid dealing with those pesky human beings. Truly effective people understand their weak points and work on them; they don't pick a job that they think will enable them to run away from them and avoid them.
That may not be important if you're a developer with a tightly defined role, where "turn up and do as you're asked" is the order of the day. For a soft-skills role, Product Managers and so on, it can be harder.
Slack/Discord/etc can help there, but often you'll get some departments who are active there and some who don't participate. Water coolers work better because everyone drinks water!
But of course companies that implement these indoctrination practices really don't want that, and will do whatever it takes to keep that control in place.
I also felt like I had to over-emote on Zoom to make sure people saw my reaction since I was just a tiny box on their screen.
On the whole, I think remote work made it clearer to employees that their relationship to their job was truly transactional, and I think companies recognize that and that's probably one reason why many want people back in the office.
I’ve done dance parties, group therapy, and family events over Zoom. They were emotional and built relationships.
I don’t think it’s a substitute for in person interactions, but “in digital” interactions can be far more meaningful if we are willing to risk it.
Cut the fucking crap. I've been conducting all my business from home since 2000 - one person software development company. I spend way less time on Zoom meetings comparatively to when I was employee and in the office. Actually I do not use Zoom. Skype, sometimes Telegram work just fine for me. Normally I do not use video feed either.
>"Because video meetings, email, and texting feel qualitatively different from face-to-face talk, we weigh them as less meaningful."
Missing income from downtown real estate?
Anyways I do not need to spend 3 hours in commute, smell other's armpits and cooking to be productive.
Did you mean 2020?